Sharpe

surname · Latin script

Meaning: medieval nickname for a quick or active person

Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

Sharpe is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.

rarermore common
  • GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 5.2K(inferred from the name graph)
  • AUAustralia≈1 in 6K
  • CACanada≈1 in 7.1K

carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.

United States (measured from records)

28,879 people, 2010

Sources
457 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

1 in 4.0K (inferred from the name graph)

Grenada

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

medieval nickname for a quick or active person.

Sources 1

  • Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]

Where in the world(measured from records)

Sharpe counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.

Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.

Where Sharpe is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States#97328,8791 in 12K29KSharpe457
GB United Kingdom#448≈13,000 est.≈1 in 5.2K18KSharpe255
CA Canada#608≈5,300 est.≈1 in 7.1K—Sharpe195
AU Australia#561≈4,200 est.≈1 in 6K—Sharpe182
IT Italy—≈3,300 est.≈1 in 19K—Sharpe21
IE Ireland#735≈640 est.≈1 in 8.1K—Sharpe59
GD Grenada—281 in 4K28—2

28,879 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.

Registers cited: Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register); Grenada — Consolidated List of Electors December 2025. Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.

Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).

Other names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

Sharpe is also recorded as another name, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Spanish surname5 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Argentina, United Kingdom, Brazil

    Languages: Spanish, Portuguese, Italian

    Also written Sharpé

54 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses(measured from records)

Sharpe is also recorded in 3 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In English, Obsolete spelling of sharp.

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In English, William R, US economist (Nobel

    as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names

  • In Irish, This well-known English name has been used as an anglicized form of Ó Géaráin in Donegal. The adjective géar means sharp. See Guerin

    as a nameThe Surnames of Ireland

Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.

Notable people with this name(measured from records)

180018501900195020002050Richard Bowdler Sharpe, b. 1847David Sharpe, b. 1910William Forsyth Sharpe, b. 1934Karen Sharpe, b. 1934Cornelia Sharpe, b. 1947Lee Sharpe, b. 1971Will Sharpe, b. 1986Cassie Sharpe, b. 1992Lil Tecca, b. 2002Shaedon Sharpe, b. 2003

The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 32 sources across 22 countries.

Official registers attesting Sharpe
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010201029K#1,226
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020202028K#1,224
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000200028K#1,155
GB United KingdomSurnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register)200218K#420
GD GrenadaGrenada — Consolidated List of Electors December 2025202528#195
US United Stateswru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.)———

Reference works 4

  • The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
  • Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
  • Wikipedia surname tokens
  • Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)

These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.

Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.

Frequently asked questions

What does the name Sharpe mean, and where does it come from?
medieval nickname for a quick or active person. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
What are other forms of the name Sharpe?
In the etymology graph, Sharp is a form of the same name in other languages.
In which country does Sharpe have the most bearers?
In the United States, the national register counted about 29 thousand people named Sharpe, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled sharpe.
Where is Sharpe most common?
Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Sharpe is densest in Grenada — about 1 in 4.0 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
How common is the name Sharpe?
In the United States, the national register counted 28,879 people named Sharpe in 2010, about 1 in 12 thousand residents.
How common is Sharpe compared with other names?
In the United States, Sharpe is the 973rd most common surname of 6,282,806 surnames recorded there.

What do you want to know about Sharpe?

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Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/sharpe

The payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.

About this data

measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated

These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.

Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.

Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.

Cite this page Mondonomo, “Sharpe” — the 973rd most common surname in United States. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Sharpe parses inside a full name →